Conversation strategies 101 with Jeanne McCarten and Helen Sandiford

Recent research has given us interesting insights into many aspects of how we communicate. Based on research from the Cambridge International Corpus of North American Spoken English, presenters Jeanne McCarten and Helen Sandiford consider the kinds of strategies speakers use to manage conversations. This presentation illustrates:

what conversation strategies are (e.g. ways to show or check understanding, to start and end conversations, or to involve other speakers in a conversation etc.)

why we need to teach these kinds of strategies to our students and how they can contribute to fluency in English

some important pointers when teaching these strategies in the classroom.

The speakers demonstrate examples of useful strategies to teach, and some useful activities, to leave you with the confidence to start teaching conversation strategies to your students.

Jeanne McCarten and Helen Sandiford are two of the authors of Touchstone. Jeanne taught English in Sweden, France, Malaysia and UK before becoming an ELT writer, and is interested in applying insights from corpus research to language teaching. Helen has extensive teacher and teacher training experience, having spent nine years in Japan setting up English programs, and teaching in Japanese senior high schools and vocational colleges.

This webinar is part of a series of English Language Teaching webinars from Cambridge University Press.Find out more at: http://www.cambridge.org/gb/elt/news/